Unlike more recent space sagas, Passengers doesn't feature astronauts, or even Mars. It's essentially a frontier tale of ordinary folk with useful trades who want to start life again on Homestead II, which happens to be an outer world colony.

The catch: in order to get there, they must be sealed in a life-support hibernation pod, where they will remain for 120 years, or about four months before arrival at Homestead II so there's time to shop.

Shop? Yes. The spacecraft is tricked out like a mashup of a futuristic airport and the late 19th century ocean liners that brought Europeans to the New World. The parallels are deliberate, right down to the different class strata of passengers and their inherent privilege, or lack thereof. For example, Jim (Chris Pratt) has an economy ticket, sponsored by the company behind Homestead II, which he will pay off as an indentured servant for the rest of his life, so his bed and breakfast options onboard suck. In contrast, Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence) has a first-class ticket and she gets a far superior travel experience: plush suite, high-end caffeine options, top-of-the-range swimming pool.

Sealed in their pods, Aurora and Jim leave Earth for the unknown. But peril strikes in the shape of space debris and Jim's pod initiates the startup process just a tad early. Eventually (no spoilers here), Aurora and Jim are awake on a ship with 5,000 hibernating passengers and 500 similarly frozen crew—90 years too soon.

That's the basic plot of Passengers but if you've seen the trailer, that's probably not why you're going to see this movie. The glorious spacecraft, the tech, the spacesuit-with-tether walk and the Big Sci-Fi Ideas are likely what caught your eye. Production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas (Oscar nominee and BAFTA winner for Inception) built all the interiors on seven vast sound stages at the Atlanta-based Pinewood Studios, as well as on the main 40,000-square-foot stage at EUE Screen Gems nearby; no green screens here, director Morten Tyldum confirmed at a recent LA press junket.

"My tights were green," quipped Michael Sheen, who brilliantly portrays an android bartender-slash-philosopher with a mechanical lower half that called for some movie magic.

Pratt pointed out there were 8 miles of LED lights inside the set, which as Lawrence joked is "easy to remember, because it's an Eminem movie title."

It was that sort of press conference, and you had to give them their due. Pratt and Lawrence no doubt answered countless questions about whether they'd go into space before Passengers's opening day tomorrow. They were heading for a flight to China not long after they wrapped that day, in fact.

The movie stars could only answer so many queries about galaxies far, far away, though. For the real nitty gritty, Sony Pictures brought in Dr. Tiffany Katari from NASA JPL and Dr. John Bradford, CEO of NASA-funded SpaceWorks, who were tapped as experts for their work on exoplanets and human stasis, respectively.

"As a planetary scientist, I hope to participate in observations using the new James Webb Space Telescope, due to launch in October 2018," Dr. Katari said. "To identify more exoplanets and see what they're made of, opening up the field tremendously. My research [to date] has focused on the larger planets, more Jupiter and Neptune in terms of size, and their weather patterns, using data from the Hubble Telescope. The data is becoming more complex so we can think of them as three-dimensional bodies now."

Sounds like we're getting just a tiny bit closer to finding potential locations for off-world colonies.

Dr. Bradford is doing NASA-funded research that might one day get humans safely into deep space. His team is addressing many of the challenges of space flight, namely the deterioration of the physical form (muscle atrophy, bone density loss, intracranial pressure, radiation exposure), not to mention the psychological trauma.

"We have a NASA grant at SpaceWorks to look at taking humans into a low metabolic rate, for missions to Mars and beyond the asteroid belts," said Bradford. "We're leveraging some ongoing work done in hospitals currently, called therapeutic hypothermia, used for cardiac arrest or traumatic brain injury. There are data points where that's been done for two weeks, so we're trying to extend it."

However, as he pointed out, "We're not looking at life-extension purposes, but more about minimizing space and consumables for a six-month mission. So, not 120 years" like the movie.

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Listening to the two scientists, it became clear much license was taken with the aesthetics of inducing future human medical stasis onscreen. In the movie, the frozen passengers and crew are all in gender-neutral, two-piece underwear in clear pods, end effectors occasionally jab them to administer nutrition and stimulate muscles. In real life, they'd be buried under life-support systems, smothered in ice crystals, and really sick when finally revived. But that would have destroyed the sleeping beauty image of the potential new-world colonists.

It's still early days on our quest to colonize other planets. We are nowhere near the breakthroughs required to make the sort of journey portrayed in Passengers. But that's what makes sci-fi so intriguing. Today's it's fiction. Tomorrow it could be humanity's history.

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